View reactions from the global media.
DOHA—For all the talk of decline, Americans can rest easy: They are still leading the world in the production of mindless babble. For months, U.S. media outlets have been gnawing over every minute aspect of Tuesday's midterm elections -- never mind that it was obvious, given the state of the economy and rising voter anger over government bailouts -- that Barack Obama was in for a rebuke of historic proportions. Perhaps the only interesting question, aside from the fates of radical candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Christine O'Donnell, was just how many seats the president's party would lose: 50, 60, 72? In the end, the results were pretty much as the polls predicted: The Republicans took the House of Representatives, while the Democrats hung on to the Senate by the skin of their teeth.
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Around the world, though, U.S. midterm elections generally elicit little more than a collective shrug. Beyond the obvious fact that it's hard to whip up enthusiasm in Brazil over the congressional race for Kansas's 1st district, the world's newspapers are generally focused on their own political dramas -- Tim Huelskamp's romp in Kansas isn't about to kick Dilma Rousseff's groundbreaking election off the front pages in São Paolo. But this year's Democratic meltdown is notable because the global infatuation with Obama is now cast against his diminished luster in the United States. To the extent that there is any theme to the coverage, it's an attempt to answer the age-old question: What's in it for us? But, moving forward, there's a larger issue lurking: Is Obama still the undisputed leader of the world's most powerful nation?
Let's begin our brief tour of the world with Britain, where commentators saw a chance to validate their ideological positions.
The Telegraph's conservative pundits are largely heralding the Republican victory. Simon Heffer says the Democrats' loss boils down to "a fundamental failure to manage expectations." Benedict Brogan worries, "If David Cameron goes to Washington, there is no single, representative Republican figure he can call on." Toby Young observes, "In an odd way, a Tea Party Movement would make much more sense in Britain where, if it was only able to capture the commanding heights of the Conservative Party, it would stand a real chance of rolling back the frontiers of the state." Nile Gardiner says the GOP win "may have saved a superpower."
Over at the liberal Guardian, it's a mixed bag. Ewen MacAskill writes, "The victory buried any remnants of the euphoria that surrounded Barack Obama's White House victory two years ago and gives the Republicans a solid base from which to mount a guerrilla campaign against Obama." Richard Adams mocks John Boehner's emotional moment: "Gosh he's getting really weepy. It's kind of sweet and then you think, this man is going to be in charge of the House of Representatives." (He also called Christine O'Donnell, the Tea Party Senate hopeful in Delaware, an "unqualified mouth on a stick.") Jonathan Freedland says Obama should "use the next two years to expose his opponents as dangerous extremists, threatening to destroy much that the voters hold dear."
Writing in Der Spiegel, German pundit Gregor Peter Schmitz seems to have absorbed the worst habits of American political punditry, attributing the Democrats' losses not to the jobless economic recovery but to Barack Obama's supposed lack of charisma. "Once celebrated as a great communicator, the president has lost touch with the mood in his country," he writes. (An accompanying staff essay asks, "Is the American Dream Over?")
France's Le Monde covered the midterms intensively, with a heavy (and predictably snide) focus on the Tea Party. Ahead of the polls, the paper published an interview with François Vergniolle de Chantal, a French "specialist" in American politics, who argued that French and Americans have a very different perception of the role of the state that dates back to their founding moments: In France, it was a republican state that brought broad equality, whereas Americans have traditionally seen the federal government, "born in distrust and rejection," as their enemy. "That's also why conspiracies theories find such resonance across the Atlantic," he said.
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